The Metropolitan have refused to say how long has been spent on investigating the so-called 'Croydon Cat Killer'.

Following a Freedom of Information (FOI) request from the Advertiser, the Met declined to make enquiries into how long officers have spent investigating, explaining that it would cost too much to retrieve the necessary information.

The refusal comes two years after an identical FOI was submitted, to which the Met were perfectly happy to respond to.

As of June 2016, officers had spent approximately 1,020 hours on investigating the cat killer, but still to this day no-one has been charged in relation to the cart deaths.

In response to the question of how many officers were currently investigating, a spokesman said: "We’re not discussing numbers of officers – although it’s worth noting that few if any officers have ever worked full time on this, so it’s difficult to quantify.

"I should also mention – with reference to “cat killer” - that the allegations are almost exclusively of mutilations of dead cats not of cats being killed by a human."

Read More

These comments come less than a year after a statement made by DS Andy Collin, the officer previously in charge of the cat killer investigation, who said: "We are now convinced the cats are being killed and then mutilated."

Tony Jenkins, who runs South Norwood Animal Rescue and Liberty (SNARL) suggested that the killer could be a journalist, due to the fact that if the killer is a single person, they would need a job which involved a lot of travel around the country.